Twilight of the Net

Pipe companies shouldn’t be allowed to own the content that runs on their pipes.

I’ve been saying all along that it’s bad business and that pipe company shareholders are ill-served by their ventures into the content business. But it’s beginning to interfere with the proper operation of the first amendment.

In the eighties, the cable monopolies used their clout to get a controlling share of every new cable channel they agreed to carry. The deadening sameness of cable programming isn’t surprising. All the creative decisions were made to please an industry whose core competencies are political payoffs and digging holes in the ground.